Argues that PhyT was designed to critique the Man of Law, an extension of the ancient "feud between law and medicine." Explores this tradition in classical and medieval sources, and identifies ways that Chaucer evoked it through adjustments to Livy…
Schiff, Randy P.
Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, eds. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 82-103.
Argues that the narrator's comments on poachers and governesses in PhyT are not digressive, but part of a broader "biopolitical" concern that "clearly condemns the parental absolutism that leads to Virginius's murder of his daughter" and aptly…
Bordalejo uses traditional and electronic methods to explore the various orders of the tales in manuscripts of CT, concluding that the order was affected by accident in some cases but by scribal intervention in others.
Morse, J. Mitchell.
Modern Language Quarterly 19 (1958): 3-20.
Describes the "intellectual milieu" of the Clerk in order to characterize him as "man of essentially humanistic temper, aware of so many complexities . . . that he found it difficult to rest in dogmatic assurance of anything." Traces the "movement…
Howard, Donald R.
Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel, eds. The Wisdom of Poetry (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 151-75.
Explores the philosophy and modern "philosophizing" and especially Bloomfield's location of the philosophy in the actual experience of TC, as for example, in the narrator's "historical hindsight," which is compared to God's prescience.
Moorman, Charles.
South Atlantic Quarterly 64 (1965): 87-99. Reprinted in A Knyght There Was: The Evolution of the Knight in Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 76-95.
Contrasts the conventionalized courtly characterization of the knight in BD with the relatively individualized courtly characterization of Troilus in TC, and goes on to assess the Knight and Theseus of KnT as a new kind of figure found only "at the…
Lepley, Douglas Lee
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1978): 1539A.
Neither tedious nor ignorant, MkT teaches a "sound Boethian lesson" and can be seen as "artistically refined" in its evocation of tragic pathos. The Knight, the Host, and the critics err in castigating the Monk and his Tale.
Asay, Timoithy M.
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2014. Fully accessible at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/18728; accessed November 22, 2022.
Argues that frame narratives make "language both a represented object and a representing agent" and "thus perfectly mimetic." Following both Dante and Boccaccio in using the device, Chaucer unsettles "easy assignations of identity" for his…
Proposes that historical thinking can be productively conceived of as recombinative fantasy rather than as empirical recollection. Uses several medieval examples of imaginative fantasy as exemplary models: Chaucer's House of Rumour in HF, Dante's…
Jones, Lowanne E.
Rupert T. Pickens, ed. Studies in Honor of Hans-Erich Keller: Medieval French and Occitan Literature and Romance Linguistics (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1993), pp. 419-26.
Jones explores the use of the leek as a phallic symbol in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and Rabelais.
Fumo, Jamie C.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 85-136.
Various associations of sight and death indicate that KnT is a "nightmare vision of vision itself" which, in comparison with Boccaccio's "Teseida," flattens the character of Emelye, intensifies her agency, and indicts chivalry. In KnT the motifs of…
Wagenknecht, Edward.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Offers a "psychography" of Chaucer, using biographical records, contemporaneous events, and Chaucer's works to describe his appearance, habits, personality, opinions, and attitudes. Focuses on the personae in Chaucer's literary works; on his…
Argues that "to see Chaucer the pilgrim as anyone other than a marvelously alert, ironic, facetious master of every situation is to misread" CT. Particularly in his views of churchmen and uses of superlatives, the narrator is best understood as "a…
The public evidence of Edward III's religious devotion reveals his rather conventional piety, "imbued with a strong and confident nationalism" and dedicated largely to commendation of his dynasty.
Weisl, Angela Jane.
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Weisl explores residual traces in contemporary American popular culture of medieval narrative structures and patterns - e.g., pilgrimage, veneration of relics, conversion, heroic accomplishment, romance, fabliau - identifying such patterns in sports…
Despite their diverse emphases, critical responses to the Monk's portrait in GP evince the same "close reading instinct" that generated E. Talbot Donaldson's "Chaucer the Pilgrim" essay and that has persisted "in an almost universal unwillingness . .…
Tracks the popularity of a passage about shoes from Rom in the nineteenth-century popular press, demonstrating how the passage forges a connection between Victorian and medieval England by using Chaucer as a supporter of Victorian interests and…
West, Philip.
Essays in Arts and Sciences 8 (1979): 7-16.
The Wife of Bath is, in B. J. Whiting's phrase, "an oxymoron in the flesh," and modern structuralist criticism helps us to see the mythic implications of her parodies of Paul's dicta concerning marriage, apostolic experience, and beatific vision.
Jost, Jean E.
Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec, eds. New Perspectives on Criseyde (Fairview, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2004), pp. 207-30
Jost applies performance theory to key points in the narrative at which Criseyde seems to manipulate her words and her behavior self-consciously to achieve a desired effect.
Fulton, Helen.
Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 106 (2006): 25-42.
Assesses the late-medieval and early modern popularity of the "story of Griselda" as an exploration of the "paradox of her non-noble status and her fitness to hold the moral high ground" and a reflection of anxiety "about marriages based on unequal…
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Crane investigates a wide range of cultural rituals, demonstrating how identity was performed in late medieval England and how such performances make meaning and establish identity. She explores the Chaucer coat of arms as self-representation rooted…
